So, one lens on the weird direction of the modern Internet is that entities created to route you to cool stuff, e.g. search, social media, have especially in the last 5-10 years been taking an ever larger part of the pie via having giant networks. Google can now control whether a news site lives or dies. Meta can take 99.5% of all ad revenue displayed next to an artist's work and they have no power.
One of the disappointing things about living in this sci fi future is that nobody wants a heads-up display. They're annoying with basically no upside in most contexts, but when I was a kid I always imagined needing data readouts or whatever.
If you actually want to change EVERYTHING here, we need more than a president. We need to own 60 seats in the Senate and take the House. If you don't understand that, then you DON'T GET HOW THE GOVERNMENT WORKS.
I was, and still am, talking about the threshold of 60 doesn't mean you get everything YOU want, only everything those 60 Senators can all agree on. You're the one who brought up fascists.
Happy to do it also. It's a shame when atheists go beyond their own faith based belief to the point of insisting everyone believe exactly what they do, or there's something wrong with them. Condescension towards fellow human beings based on their faith based beliefs is stupid, as we can see everyone has them....
It is a lovely country, and amazingly significant historically.
It's very small, folks say the best thing about living in Luxembourg is it's so easy to leave Luxembourg.
Our favorite restaurant was called "Chez Bacano" in the Grund (it's still there). We'd have huge shrimp cooked in butter and wine, and we'd drink Vino Verde. The owner would carry out the shrimp on these flaming roasting pans.
Many people speak like 5 languages, and switch between them seamlessly.
BTW, while I don't consider myself to be a Doctor Who expert by ANY means (I really only know the Tom Baker era well, and by NO means comprehensively) I do consider use of "Dr. Who" instead of "Doctor Who" to be a strong signal of an amateur.
And yes, my Leela is named after Tom Baker's companion Leela -- intelligent, beautiful, and sometimes, deadly.
Even the credits vary, sometime Doctor Who and sometimes The Doctor.
If you watch some of the earliest episodes there is a running gag where someone would ask his name and the reply would be "The Doctor" and they would say "Doctor who?".
Watching an interview with Tom Baker seems pretty much exactly like what actually interviewing Doctor Who would be like. Because after all, he IS the only genuine Doctor Who! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzXalyQqf2M
Director Ridley Scott has said that his original planned ending for 1979's "Alien" was not for Ripley to succeed in killing the alien and going into suspension, but for the alien to actually rip her head off. This reportedly infuriated studio execs to such an extent that they threatened to remove him from the project if he proceeded in that direction. So Ripley (and her cat) got to survive to fight the xenomorphs another day. Probably a wise decision for the sake of sequels at least.
Just bumped my #Mastodon instance up to 4.X from 3.X. Another rocky upgrade experience. I was expecting it this time. No fun.
Since elasticsearch and opensearch are so heavy, I'm not going to be running either at this point, which is sad since on such a small instance a nice lightweight search alternative would be useful. Oh well.
Still no way to quote posts, eh? Sad again.
Not clear to me how the full text functionality would work in any case. Does it only function on the local instance? Can people do full text searches across the Mastodon network for opted in profiles? If so, how? If not, yeah, another sad.
